Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man - Softcover

"A fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology." -"The New York Times" "Admirable . . . One returns to Thomas Hardy with renewed pleasure and surprise." -"The New York Review of Books" "Tomalin brings . . . the skills of an experienced and accomplished biographer . . . and the confidence of a deeply informed literary critic." -Jonathan Yardley, "The Washington Post"

Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. This seminal biography, by our leading biographer, covers Hardy’s illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.